Markzware is not owned by Quark and Markzware is in zero danger of being bought out by anyone, let alone the holding company that owns Quark.

QuarkXPress is not going to open ID files. You can use the converter provided by Markzware, but there is a VERY big difference between an InDesign document and an XPress document.

InDesign documents are in fact a database. You insert your objects (frames, images, text, etc) into the database. This is why it's almost impossible to downsave an ID document, because you are going from a newer database to an older, incompatible database.

QuarkXPress documents are simply a file format.

Your arguments about choice of app interface totally ignores the concept of business and the free market. You are essentially saying that Adobe and Quark should unite. That's not going to happen. They are both businesses out for profit.

I disagree that Quark cannot survive the competition. Quark is still around. None of the people I know in the company are giving any indication that Quark is facing imminent economic ruin and Quark continues to develop new versions of XPress. How does that indicate that Quark will not survive?

As for help…as a longtime XPress user that moved to InDesign I can offer some suggestions.

ID is palette happy and I come from XPress which is heavy on keyboard shortcuts. So, I made every shortcut I use in XPress as equivalent as I could in InDesign. I set my palettes to hide after use. In this way I can mimic certain things.

For instance, CMD+B is for the border of a box in XPress. I set the keyboard shortcut for Stroke in InDesign as CMD+B. When I exit the palette after applying a stroke the palette closes. Further, I set my palettes up so things would be as close as I could get them to XPress as well.

For instance in XPress OPTN+F13 will bring up the Usage>Pictures dialogue box. I have my Pictures palette set off to one side in ID because unless that palette is up you cannot update pictures. All I have to do then is select an image on the page in ID (or just Select All to make it easy) and if an image is modified I have a shortcut set (SHIFT+F13) to update the image. If the image is missing, CTRL+F13 will bring up the dialogue box to relink an image. CMD+OPTN+F13 will bring up a dialogue box to relink all images in the document to a FOLDER (where the images are). If the image is simply missing, but in the same general file path then CMD+F13 will force ID to automatically relink it.

Simply pressing F13 using my ID shortcuts brings up the Find>Fonts dialog box and is the direct equivalent to pressing F13 in XPress to bring up the Usage>Fonts dialogue.

CMD+T (runaround in XPress) equals Textwrap in ID. CMD+SHIFT+F brings up your paragrah formatting, CMD+SHIFT+D brings up character formatting. CMD+SHIFT+M brings up the transform box which lets you adjust the dimensions of a taxt frame while you have the text tool selected and are editing text (because you can't do this in the command palette while the text tool is selected). CMD+OPTN+M gets you into the command palette where you can tab through the fields to make changes. Want to go back directly to the last field you edited? CTRL+ENTER.

Yeah, I heavily modified ID's shortcuts to be mine. To be as much like the ones in XPress as I could. There are ways…

Below is a link to my preferences, keyboard shortucuts (Pueblo1) and my workspaces (I generally use the "Multitask" workspace (be warned it's for a three display setup)).